This piece originally appeared on Unabridged, a newsletter about words published by Stefan Fatsis. If you enjoy this story, and want to read more like it, please consider subscribing to Unabridged. Under an oak-beamed ceiling on the top floor of one of Washington, D.C.’s coolest…
Since 1960, the world has lost hundreds of languages — and gained thousands.
Toki Pona has only 120 words. None of them change form, in any way, in any context. The grammar is nearly the bare minimum — specified word order, and a few particles to denote a predicate, a direct object, subordination, negation. Interpreting any utterance takes a lot of context clues, or a lot…
10 lesser-known principles that explain more about life than most books do
Hanlon’s razor
Price’s law
Build an AI weather agent in 40 lines of Python using Hugging Face's smolagents library. Learn to create tools, connect LLMs, and run autonomous tasks.
An agent is essentially an LLM equipped with tools
approach to reasoning
120 Ships Destroyed, One Strait Still Closed. Until the A-10 Changed the Math at Hormuz.
As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.
A complete guide to CLAUDE.md, custom commands, skills, agents, and permissions, and how to set them up properly.
Your brain on "not X but Y"
This happens in seconds. A student with high verbal aptitude processes this almost instantaneously.
Psychometricians have called antonyms the most efficient measure of verbal intelligence in the toolkit: high g-loading, high discrimination at the top of the ability range, no contextual scaffolding.
Himax Technologies has long been seen as a peripheral player in the AI boom. But that perception may be about to change. Buried inside a series of recent TSMC patent filings lies an unexpected...
Researchers at Tsinghua University and Z.ai built IndexCache to eliminate redundant computation in sparse attention models like DeepSeek and GLM. The training-free technique cuts 75% of indexer operations, delivering up to 1.82x faster time-to-first-token at 200K context lengths…
MVPs are learning tools that test whether an idea is valuable to users.
The bane of sailors for centuries, scurvy is a disease that has caused immense suffering, even to the present day.
Ignore them and you age faster.
There is a closing window to stop Waymos from creating omnigridlock.
I don’t think people have thought hard enough about how bad this could get.
Thirteen years ago, Mike Neighbors dreamed up an idea to help others: He started writing down his mistakes.
What makes small town healthcare different
For context, I work in a Django/React TS/React Native codebase on a 20-person team at MorphMarkethttps://www.morphmarket.com/. I have 17 years experience wit...
Watch someone backspace 40 characters instead of pressing CTRL+W, and you’ll understand why this list exists. A collection of shell tricks-grouped by what works everywhere and what’s Bash/Zsh-speci...
Learn to integrate GitLab feature flags into a Python Flask app using the Unleash SDK to control feature rollouts without redeploying.
Success in modern UX isn’t about having the most content. It’s about having the most findable content. Yet even with more data and better tools than ever, internal search often fails, leaving users to rely on global search engines to find a single page on a local site. Why does…
Google published a research blog post on Tuesday about a new compression algorithm for AI models. Within hours, memory stocks were falling. Micron dropped 3 per cent, Western Digital ...
(This is a fleshed out version of the lightning talk I gave at Megameetup) …
Scientists at CERN built a container weighing about a ton to transport just 92 subatomic antimatter particles without annihilating them
The shift away from Google search signals a broader recalibration: marketers are chasing commerce media that can prove it converts.
Before the cartels took over, Harvey Prager built a life on millions of dollars of drug money. A prosecutor called him “the last of the amateurs."
Learn how to set up Nanobot, connect it to WhatsApp, and power it with OpenAI GPT-5.3-Codex for a practical, always-on AI agent.
Could switching to 800 V DC be the key to more efficient data centers?
The business world has long had special jargon for the Kafkaesque incompetence bedeviling the ranks of upper management. There is “the Peter principle,” first described in a satirical book of the same name in 1968.
Back in January, a day before a big winter freeze was about to hit Tulsa and dump a foot of snow on us, our home’s furnace stopped working. I didn’t want to spend a week without heat, so I called an HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning) company. The technician who…
Lace, a Norway-headquartered chipmaking equipment startup which is backed by Microsoft, has raised $40 million in funding to further develop a technology that could enable significant advances in semiconductor design and manufacturing, the company said on Monday.
Understand the difference between apt and apt-get in Debian and Ubuntu. When to use each tool, how the commands map to each other, and which one belongs in your scripts.
The comm utility lets you find which lines are unique to one file or another, and which lines are common to both.
When you type a query into a search engine, something has to decide which documents are actually relevant — and how to rank them. BM25 (Best Matching 25), the algorithm powering search engines like Elasticsearch and Lucene, has been the dominant answer to that question for…
The clever part is that BM25 doesn’t reward keyword stuffing
saturation
Starlette 1.0 Skill offers a concise guide for building robust web applications with Starlette, a lightweight ASGI framework. The accompanying demo showcases a task management app featuring projects, tasks, comments, …
Access large language models from the command-line
Incompetent people tend to see themselves as not just competent, but highly competent. So, at any rate, holds the theory of the 'Dunning-Kruger effect,' previously featured here on Open Culture. But does the converse also hold: do highly competent people tend to see themselves…
Why Anthropic’s integration into hyperscaler silicon programs may give it a lasting advantage in the economics of frontier AI.
From MHA and GQA to MLA, sparse attention, and hybrid architectures
A look at modern news websites. How programmatic ad-tech, huge payloads and hostile architecture destroyed the reading experience.
Shortly after Amazon announced its $50 billion investment in OpenAI, AWS invited me on a private tour of the chip lab at the heart of the deal.
Note: Based on the article **[An exclusive tour of Amazon’s Trainium lab, the chip that’s won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple](#rid:1653401870)**, here are the key points: ### Strategic Impact & Partnerships * **Major Adoption:** Amazon’s custom chips have secured massive commitments from leading AI labs. **Anthropic** runs Claude on over 1 million Trainium2 chips, and **OpenAI** recently signed a…
Safely Deploying Machine Learning Models to Production: Four Controlled Strategies (A/B, Canary, Interleaved, Shadow Testing)
Note: This bookmark, **[Safely Deploying ML Models to Production: Four Controlled Strategies](#rid:1652757915)**, is an article from MarkTechPost that outlines how to release machine learning models into production while minimizing risk. The article details four key deployment strategies: * **A/B Testing**: Randomly splits a small percentage of total traffic to the new model while the rest stays on the…
40 Google features to find exactly what you need, the alternative search engines that do things Google won't, and the reference desk framework underneath all of it.
A gallery that collects architecture figures from The Big LLM Architecture Comparison and related articles, with fact sheets and links back to the original sections.
The genetic disorder that turns the body into an iron trap